The first Soviet leader used the term “enemies of the people” shortly after the 1917 revolution. Vladimir Lenin suggested that

all leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party, a party filled with enemies of the people, are hereby to be considered outlaws, and are to be arrested immediately and brought before the revolutionary court.

Almost always lacking proof to support the claim, Soviet leaders — most especially Joseph Stalin — sent millions of citizens into exile or to their death because they were “enemies of the people.”

Of course, the Soviets weren’t alone; their satellite states adopted similar police-state tactics. So did other tyrants elsewhere around the world.

Bill Burton, who served as deputy press secretary in the Obama administration, said that while social media now allows politicians to communicate differently than in the 1970s and 1980s, when television was the best way for an administration to relay a message, hammering the media was never considered in the White House where he worked.

“Sure, the president disagreed with coverage,” said Burton, noting a certain contempt for Fox News, and then-host Glenn Beck in particular. “But this president has shown an overt, vocal discontent with a sacred institution vital to this democracy.”

Over the weekend, the administration could have backed down from what President Trump tweeted. Today’s Columbia Journalism Review newsletter reminds us that the president’s men instead reiterated his assertions.

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus backed up Trump’s comments during an interview with John Dickerson on CBS, describing recent reporting on Trump’s ties to Russia and his relationship with the intelligence community as “grossly inaccurate, overstated, overblown,” and “total garbage.” Dickerson pushed back on Priebus, asking, “Is the strategy now to answer any question by just turning it back on the media and using a fight with the media as a way to try to control the storyline?”

If that’s his strategy, it has a lot in common with that of Latin American populists like Hugo Chavez, writes Joel Simon for CJR. Like Trump, Chavez sought a mobilized, committed base rather than broad support, so he deliberately sought to create a more polarized society by undermining the press. “The necessary first step of a strategy of fomenting greater political polarization is to marginalize the media, and more broadly to undermine its ability to provide a shared, unifying narrative,” writes Simon. At the rally Trump held in Florida on Saturday, The Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson and David Weigel bore witness to the ever widening divide between Trump supporters and those who oppose him.